Social Impacts. Overnight injections of migrant workers will not build healthy communities and can have severely adverse impacts on existing communities, especially those of indigenous nations on their traditional lands. Such development brings vices and long term displacement too often. Drugs, alcohol and associated violence spreads. Hunting becomes difficult when the land is threatened, leading to a further loss of culture and tradition. In towns like Fort McMurray there is no planning for the future, but merely consumption in the present. However transient the individuals may be, the populations will not leave, as “development” takes on a logic all its own. All levels of run away development are subordinate to that development, not social need.
Hoaxers target Big Oil
Monday December 3 2007
Environmental campaigners today appeared to have opened up a new front in the battle against Big Oil over climate change when they established a bogus website and sent out a press release committing BP, Shell and others to a 90% cut in carbon outputs by 2050 with no strings attached.
Settlers and natives, united against the government
THIS COUNTRY: ONTARIO: URANIUM EXPLORATION
Settlers and natives, united against the government
ROY MacGREGOR
December 3, 2007
Let us head down Snow Road on this morning when the plowed banks are higher than they have been any Dec. 3 for some time.
Let us visit on a bitter weekend when Environment Canada has predicted the coldest winter in 15 years.
And here let us talk about global warming - and the hints of heat to come in at least the next 15 years.
NDP yet to break its silence on peak oil
News Features
Publish Date: November 22, 2007
The federal Green party's B.C. organizer wonders how committed the
NDP is to climate change and addressing peak oil, especially when its
provincial leader, Carole James, drives a crossover SUV.
Ben West told the Georgia Straight he was unaware that James owns a
Subaru Forester–a cross between a regular car and an SUV–but said a
"crossover" SUV sounds like the "definition of hypocrisy".
"How often does she go off-roading? I'm curious," West said.
Halt oilsands: water expert
Athabasca River at risk, says renowned U of A scientist
Kate Jaimet, Ottawa Citizen; CanWest News Service
Published: 8:59 am
OTTAWA - The scientist who won Canada's top research prize for his work on pollution in the Great Lakes now wants a moratorium on development in the Alberta oilsands, saying the rush to extract petroleum could threaten the mighty Athabasca River.
Excerpt:
"Because construction isn't likely to begin before 2013 or 2014, the Alaska project isn't likely in direct competition with a plan to build a gas pipeline from the Mackenzie Delta in the Northwest Territories to Alberta. Mackenzie construction could start in late 2009 if it receives regulatory approval."
Since the hearings have successfully carried the lie and the crime against the environment of not being a cumulative impact assessment-- steadfastly ruling that the hearings could not cover the tar sands, and included denials and obfuscations of the final end goal of the natural gas being to help ramp up the ecological, genocidal and grotesquely anti-human tar sands operations north of Fort Muck, it should be VERY CLEAR why the North Central Corridor was officially announced only as the hearings on the MGP are finishing.
Labour group: oilpatch boom causes companies to cut corners on safety
Canadian Press, Calgary, Alberta, November 29, 2007
The head of Alberta's Federation of Labour says the province's economic boom has caused some companies to cut corners on worker safetyan issue highlighted this week when a fire killed two workers on a major Enbridge Inc. (TSX:ENB) pipeline in Minnesota.
"Health and safety has become much more of an issue in Alberta workplaces right across the board since the economy has gone on such a booming trend," Gil McGowan said Thursday in an interview.
Pembina Institute Releases Report, Hosts Forum on "Unlikely Allies"
Media Contact: Ed Whittingham
Calgary-November 28, 2007-The Pembina Institute, a national environmental think tank, today released a case study compendium and hosted a forum on innovative partnerships between unlikely allies who help make resource development sustainable. The unlikely allies comprise resource companies and their external stakeholders such as communities, landowner associations and environmental groups. This is the first report of its kind to document Canada-based examples.
Weekend Edition
November 24 / 25, 2007
The Origins of Neoliberal Environmentalism
Justice Stephen Breyer and Cancer Bonds
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Any man admired by both Senators Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch can't be all good. And, in fact, Stephen Breyer's elevation to the highest bench illustrates concisely how, across the past twenty years, Kennedyesque liberalism and Hatchian conservatism have merged into a unified, pro-corporate posture.
Group calls officials to Keystone hearings
Argus Leader, South Dakota
By staff reports
November 27, 2007
The WEB Rural Water system in Aberdeen is calling eight state officials to appear and respond to questions when the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission holds hearings in December on whether to grant TransCanada a permit for its proposed Keystone Pipeline.
The pipeline would run the length of South Dakota and could carry almost 600,000 barrels of crude oil daily from Alberta to oil refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma.
